Oklahoma State University women’s basketball coach Kurt Budke and assistant coach Miranda Serna were killed when the single-engine plane they were riding in during a recruiting trip crashed near a wildlife management area in central Arkansas.

… to go in to the University of Central Arkansas campus. Like the similar University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, UCA appears to be an almost wholly criminal enterprise (scroll down). The basic form of intellectual inquiry on both campuses is: How can I steal all the school’s money?

UCA keeps losing presidents due to their personal money management issues… And now it’s losing vice presidents. This one vp – who seems to have made international students work harder than they’re legally allowed (the story doesn’t describe the nature of the work – personal work for the vp?) – is harder to get rid of because he’s a professor. So what they’re doing is giving him no classes, firing him from the vice presidency, and keeping his salary (somewhat lowered) intact. Beautiful tenure tale, no? Behave very badly, and get $90,000 for doing nothing. Tenured professors, take note.

This guy

also accompanied now former UCA President Allen C. Meadors [latest presidential bad boy] on a trip to Mexico that included planned stops at two universities, but the second visit was canceled and the two spent two nights in the resort town of Cancun.

Meadors, in emails to university administrators, said the second stop was canceled because it would have been an additional seven- to eight-hour drive to the second university.

That makes sense. Wasn’t until the president and vice-president got to Mexico that they realized there are distances between cities.

Clearly we need to take all decision-making out of the hands of the current UCA administration. We need to figure out exactly what’s going on there. A fact-finding mission would be a good place to start. Might shake things up a bit.

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Mr UD said the story of the distant cities and the unforeseen issue of transport reminded him of something Mao once wrote:

Coal and iron cannot walk by themselves; they need vehicles to transport them. This I did not foresee.

UD cannot improve on this comment in response to the latest from America’s most hick-laden university, Central Arkansas.

UD followed, when the story first arose, the heavily indebted University of Central Arkansas president who forged the names of some UCA administrators on a letter to the school’s trustees. The letter told the trustees to give Lu Hardin a big ol’ deferred compensation package now, pronto. The remarkably incurious trustees (All pals of Hardin’s, maybe? Hardin’s a Mike Huckabee protege, by the way.) went ahead and did this. Then some damn newspaper began investigating.

University presidents aren’t supposed to steal from their schools, and Hardin now faces thirty years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering.